What Actually Happened To The Boeing Starliner

in the summer of 2024 the people of Earth were captivated by a story unfolding high above us in outer space The Voyage of the Boeing Starliner and her crew would make headlines all around the world not as a story of Triumph and Adventure but as a story of failure this is a series of unfortunate events that goes way deeper than just one broken spacecraft and two stranded astronauts to get the real story of Starliner we need to go beyond the headlines and dive deep into the inner workings of NASA and the space flight industry first let's meet the company at the heart of this Saga Boeing of course all of us today have the luxury of hindsight when it comes to the many failures and controversies of the Boeing Aerospace company but when NASA first made the choice to trust Boeing with the future of human space exploration they were making a safe bet from a certain point of view up until this point Boeing had cemented their reputation as a reliable innovator they built the first stage booster of NASA's original Moon rocket the Saturn 5 Boeing built the lunar rover that astronauts used to rip around the Moon Boeing contractors were all over the construction of the Space Shuttle orbiters Boeing was the primary builder of the American modules on the International Space Station they built the Delta 4 rocket not to mention the company's long track record with both Military and Commercial airplanes we could go on and on with the kind of resume that Boeing possessed in the early 2000s you can't really blame NASA for putting their faith in the Old Guard but we can point to one key event that in hindsight was an early indicator that Boeing had turned a corner in 1997 Boeing made a gigantic business deal to acquire a competing aircraft manufacturer called McDonald dougas this came at a cost of $14 billion which was an epic amount of money at the time but many in the Aerospace industry would say that the true cost of the deal was the so of the old Boeing the Boeing of the Prem merger era was known as an Engineers company the people who made these incredible flying machines were the ones who called the shots safety was Paramount money and profits were only an afterthought it was quality and design that steered the ship but the problems arose when the culture of McDonald Douglas began to seep in it was a culture that paid more attention to shareholders than it did to engineers and within the Aerospace industry it was noted that a passion for making Great Planes was replaced with a passion for cutting costs it was said that McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing own money the thing about the rot is that it starts out slow and often times the Decay will take years or even decades to truly make itself known now let's get to know our spacecraft the Boeing Starliner is a partially reusable crew capsule and service module designed and built by the Boeing Aerospace company in a project that began nearly 15 years ago in 2010 the initial funding was provided by NASA under their commercial crew initiative which had identified Starliner as a candidate to replace the soon Tobe decommission space shuttle Fleet as a means to transport people and supplies to the International Space Station Starliner was built for fully autonomous operation but also includes traditional manual flight controls for the mission pilot this is a highly maneuverable spacecraft thanks to a wide variety of onboard thrusters and Rocket engines there are 52 individual nozzles on the Starliner service module 28 are classified as reaction control system thrusters these low power jets are used throughout the flight to control the orientation of the spacecraft another 20 thrusters are dedicated to orbital maneuvering and attitude control these are more powerful than the RCs nozzles and are used to either raise or lower the orbital velocity of the Starliner the four most powerful engines on Starliner are only used in case of emergency these are rs 88 rocket engines and they are part of an abort system that would push the Starliner far away from its rocket booster at any point during the ascent into space the RCs and omac thrusters on the service module are grouped into four doghouses equally spaced around the perimeter of the service module each containing five omac thrusters three AF facing and two forward facing plus seven RCS thrusters that face front rear left and right then there are another 12 RC s thrusters built into the crew capsule segment of the vehicle these are reserved only for controlling the orientation of the capsule during atmospheric re-entry this High concentration of control thrusters gives the Starliner incredible maneuverability for a wide range of on orbit docking scenarios either with the ISS or even future commercial space stations but it also introduces a lot of complexity with every Thruster becoming a potential point of failure let's take a break from the technical side to meet the human beings involved Barry Butch Wilmore and Sita Sunny Williams these are two of NASA's most experienced astronauts and it's not hard to see why this Duo were chosen to fly the first crude mission on a relatively new vehicle with some known issues Sunny is a fan favorite among NASA astronauts she spent 322 days in Space over two missions and logged over 50 hours in an Eva suit doing spacewalks before coming to NASA she was a Navy diver and combat helicopter pilot in Operation Desert Shield then went on to become a member of the Society of experimental test pilots Butch also has two orbital missions under his belt including one as pilot of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2009 he's a Navy veteran as well flying 21 missions as a combat fighter pilot in Operation Desert Storm for both Butch and sunny they're now infamous liner Mission will very likely mark their final trip to outer space these two are in the upper 1% of sturdy human beings they have True Grit the right stuff they thrive in life and death situations danger is their middle name so to say that they are stranded or in any way suffering at the ISS is pretty comical so we know our key players let's talk about how they ended up in this mess to begin with the initial seed funding that Boeing received from NASA in 2010 amounted to $18 million this was the first round of what they called the commercial crew development program it wasn't much money but enough to begin the process of transforming a concept into a prototype Boeing was optimistic that Starliner could be fully operational by 2015 as long as the money continued to flow in 2011 NASA turned over the use of their Orbiter processing facility at the Kennedy Space Center to Boeing for the Manu manufacturing and testing of Starliner this was the hanger where the space shuttle Fleet had been maintained for decades over the next 3 years NASA would hold three more rounds of development funding warding Boeing 92 milon 460 million and $10 million respectively everything was going exactly as Boeing Executives had foreseen yet again the company was tapped into a seemingly endless stream of government funding on a high-profile NASA contract and they had already deployed their lobbyists to push NASA towards awarding Boeing a soul Source contract meaning they don't have to split the pot with anyone of course the idea was presented in a way that Boeing needed the program's full budget for the successful development of Starliner over at Nasa they were mostly more than happy to take the bait this was Boeing they built the Saturn 5 rocket booster what could possibly go wrong here's a guy you probably don't know William H gersen Meer at the time he was NASA's lead on the human exploration program and he agreed that Starliner was a great idea on paper but he also thought that selecting just one company for the commercial crew program was a bad idea he convinced NASA to secure additional funding that would support two competing efforts in 2014 NASA announced that Boeing and SpaceX would be awarded contracts to develop commercial crew Vehicles Boeing would receive a fixed price deal at $4.2 billion while the rookies over at SpaceX were awarded 2.6 billion to certify their crew Dragon vehicle this was the deal NASA made at the time to receive the full contract amount each company would need to successfully complete an abort test an uncrewed orbital flight test a crude orbital flight test and six crude missions to the ISS now of course Starliner was not fully operational by 2015 the uncrewed test flight was push back to 2017 then 2018 then 2019 the thing to remember is that Boeing had grown accustomed to operating Under The Cost Plus funding model meaning that Boeing would simply build the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee on top of that they were spending other people's money working with a fixed priced contract was a whole new ball game every penny they spend is a penny less in profit or a penny more in loss this is where the McDonald Douglas Arab boing Executives and their preference for cost cutting start to ruin everything Starliner might not have been the greatest spaceship ever designed but it was a good idea one that never got a fair chance at success either way in December 2019 the Boeing Starliner took to the skies a top an atlas 5 rocket and charged Head Strong into outer space where upon its arrival Starliner almost immediately got lost and flew wildly off course of all things you can imagine going wrong in a spacecraft the clock wasn't set properly when Starliner tried to figure out where it was on the mission timeline it ended up being off by 11 hours so instead of immediately firing up those omac thrusters to raise the orbit to the altitude of the ISS Starliner just kind of floated around up there doing nothing by the time the vehicle made a delayed push to reach orbital velocity Starliner ended up burning too much fuel leaving it with not enough propellant to safely dock with the ISS it's actually a good thing that Starliner was delayed on that first flight because just 2 hours before commanding the vehicle's return Boeing discovered a software error that would have caused Starliner thrusters to fire incorrectly instead of the crew capsule and the service module separating and drifting away from each other they would have collided and then either exploded or just gone tumbling out of control into the atmosphere and burnt up NASA officially classified this first test mission as a quote highly visible close call but the capsule did return to Earth safely after touchdown Sunny Williams gives the capsule a name Calypso the irony being that in Homer's Odyssey Calypso is a deity who captures odyusa is also a style of Caribbean music where the singer just makes it up as they go along so while these problems involving thrusters might sound familiar the failures on test flight one were actually software bugs not Hardware related so at the time it seemed like an easy fix not to say that Starliner hadn't already experienced catastrophic problems with their Thruster system that were largely swept under the rug and kept quiet in the media it was 2018 when Boeing conducted a hot fire test of those four large abort system engines this burn was successful but at the end of the test half of the propellant valves stuck open this released an additional 4,000 lb of toxic hydrazine fuel into the air around the test stand which then ignited into a giant Fireball that engulfed the surrounding equipment typical Boeing right well wrong actually kind of the entire propulsion system on Starliner was manufactured by aerojet rocket di company that was in the same league when it comes to Legendary Aerospace contractors they built the F1 engines that powered the Saturn 5 booster that made Boeing so famous to begin with rocket dine also built the rs25 engine that lifted the space shuttle into orbit So in theory a simple Thruster system on a tiny Space Capsule should not have been a problem it was 2021 and Boeing again had Starliner on the Launchpad 2 years of rewriting software had led up to to this moment and as the final preparations were made for launch 13 of the propulsion system fuel valves malfunctioned attempts to fix the problem while on the Launchpad failed and the rocket was returned to the vertical integration facility where more attempts to fixed the problem also failed Boeing decided to return the spacecraft to the factory cancelling the launch the valves had been stuck by corrosion moisture entered the system and interacted with the propellant causing the surrounding metal to rust and freeze shut Boeing accused aerojet rocket dine of manufacturing faulty Hardware aerojet accused Boeing of poor communication and not paying their bills two legendary Titans of the space flight industry that had flown people to the Moon reduced to squabbling children who couldn't even manage to put an empty capsule into low earth orbit again given the history this was a surprising turn of events but there were signs for anyone who chose to look you see following the award of the commercial crew contract in 2014 NASA assigned a team of four experienced astronauts Bob Benin Eric boow Doug Hurley and Sanita Williams to serve as consultants to engineers at both Boeing and SpaceX Hurley reported a stark contrast in the working relationship between the astronauts and the engineers at the two companies while the SpaceX Engineers were receptive to feedback enthusiastic about collaborating and attentive to suggestions Hurley found the Boeing Engineers to be indifferent arrogant and overconfident he also said that the Boeing team failed to inform the astronauts about the propellant leak that occurred during the padore test ultimately Hurley told the chief of the astronaut office that he would not fly on Starliner Doug and Bob would later go on to command the crew dragon's historic demo to Mission in 2020 the first crude Flight of the spacecraft that successfully took them both to the ISS and Back Again 2 years after SpaceX delivered their first crew into orbit an empty Starliner was back on the Launchpad in May 2022 again the atlas 5 booster did its thing and deployed Starliner into orbit and again this is where things started to go wrong two of the omac thrusters failed during the orbital insertion burn now because Starliner has so many thrusters it's not that big of a deal if one or two go down the remaining omx were able to to compensate With a Little Help from the RCs thrusters except then a couple of RCs thrusters also failed in the middle of docking with the ISS this was blamed on low pressure in the combustion chamber still not a huge deal though again redundancy means that one or two failures won't compromise the mission Starliner was able to successfully dock with the ISS and for the most part it seemed like everything was going to be fine not perfect not even great not as good as SpaceX but fine okay this is what we are all here for it's May 2024 and Starliner is once again back on the Launchpad strapped in a top an atlas 5 and for the first time there are human beings sitting in the command chairs Butch Wilmore and sunny Williams in the very same capsule that Sunny had named Calypso all of those years before and they are ready for a test flight fully aware that there are known unknowns about how their ship is going to perform up there except their Starliner doesn't actually go anywhere the launch was scrubbed due to an oxygen valve problem on the atlas rocket which turned out to be a good thing because later on the Starliner service module would spring a leak in the helium gas system which would even further delay the launch nearly a month later on June first Butch and sunny were back in the saddle and prepared to fly when a computer error on the ground system scrubed their launch for the third time on June 5th 2024 Our Heroes strapped themselves in and this time they would be in for one hell of a ride the first thing that Butch and sunny were scheduled to do in orbit was a thorough Shakedown of Starliner maneuvering system that included both automated flight and manual control of the spacecraft the crew was instructed to repeatedly fire the RCs thrusters while the system monitored their performance this stress testing led to a gradual degradation ation in RCS Thruster performance leading the spacecraft software to consider five of them damaged and unusable then the helium started leaking again you might wonder why a spaceship needs helium well it's all about pressure the thrusters on Starliner are pressure-fed hypergolic rocket engines meaning they use self-combusting propellants that ignite on contact in the combustion chamber the force that moves the propellants from the tanks to the chamber comes from pressurized gas and the thrust of the engine is controlled by valves that release a very specific amount of pressure into the system we use helium as the pressurized gas of choice because it's the second lightest element in the known universe and weight is critical when it comes to space flight helium is also non-reactive meaning it can't catch fire or cause corrosion or mix with any other elements to create an unwanted byproduct being so light however helium atoms have a very easy time escap keeping from pretty much any containment system you know when you buy party balloons and they float for like a day before slowly falling back down that's helium leakage anyway remember when we said that one or two thrusters going down was no big deal well five thrusters is a lot more of a deal and to make matters worse all of the affected nozzles were pointed towards the rear of the spacecraft going back to that dog house design each cluster has two aft-facing RCS thrusters giving us eight in total total so at this point we are down more than half this led to about an hour of time where Starliner was sitting just Out Of Reach of the space station with the crew waiting for an answer on whether or not they can proceed with five thrusters offline there was no way to make a safe approach it's probably just as unlikely that they would have been able to turn around and come back if there was any time during the mission where Butch and sunny were genuinely stuck this was it what happened though was that Boeing Eng on the ground were able to talk to Starliner computers and allow four of the disabled thrusters to come back online this was good enough Starliner completed a successful docking with the ISS and everything seemed fine that's fine within the parameters of a test flight which everyone involved knew was going to be unpredictable at best in the best case scenario starlander Mission would last 8 Days initially the departure delays were looked at as a short-term setback there was a scheduled conflict with a spacewalk on the ISS then a few more days for some additional testing even after reviewing all of the data from the flight computers Boeing Engineers couldn't come up with a reason why the Thruster system had failed during the approach and then suddenly worked again in the docking sequence all they knew was that after a certain point the thrusters started putting out less power than what the system commanded it to and that made the computer freak out and shut it down in a quest for more data they had Butch and sunny return to the Starliner and hot fire seven of the eight aft-facing RCS thrusters to measure their performance this provided more information but still no root cause of the failure Boeing and NASA made the call to delay starliners return even further while they put together a new testing rig on the ground Boeing Engineers would take the same Thruster from Starliner and run it through a series of burns on a test stand until they were able to replicate the issue that had occurred in space this would take a couple of weeks and it meant Butch and sunny weren't coming home until at least the end of July this was where we started hearing about astronauts stranded on the ISS but the reality was that everyone involved had already anticipated this as a potential outcome there was already additional food and supplies waiting for the two extra crew members there was no shortage of jobs on the station to keep them busy Butch and sunny have been doing everything from fixing space toilets to conducting new scientific experiments and giving press conferences live from space to ensure everyone that they are doing just fine Boeing essentially has two big Hang-Ups that are keeping them from going forward with a return all of the malfunctioning systems are on Starliner service module that's the part that doesn't return to the ground it burns up in the atmosphere so when they lose the hardware they lose the ability to diagnose the problems and since they still don't know what the problem even was in the first place they don't know if Starliner can safely perform a deorbit burn and re-entry even with these known unknowns boing clings to the message that their spacecraft is safe they repeatedly tell the media that they could bring Butch and sunny back if they really wanted to and everything would be fine but they are choosing to wait and gather more data everything is fine in August Boeing confirmed that everything is not fine what they've managed to discover is that a Teflon seal inside the Thruster oxygen valve is heating up and expanding in periods of high use like when Butch was performing these Shakedown Maneuvers on approach to the ISS so when that seal expands Beyond its expected size it constricts the flow of oxidizer into the combustion chamber just a little bit more than what the computer is anticipating and that leads to a low thrust reading that triggers a shutdown so at least we know what happened but somehow we are still left totally unsure why it happened these issues were never reported in two previous flights of the Starliner and even after having Butch and sunny perform a second hot fire test of the Starliner thrusters while do to the ISS they weren't able to replicate the failure so at this point all we know is that we don't know what's going to happen when Starliner undocks and begins maneuvering itself into a re-entry flight path the thrusters could work fine they could fail in the same way as before they could fail even worse and this is where NASA stepped in and made the call that Butch and sunny we're not going to be on board Starliner when we find out sending a ship back empty is no small decision it creates a ripple effect that changes a lot of very important plans Butch and sunny still need a ride home eventually and spaceships these days don't come standard with third row seating so in order to bring them back we need to bump two astronauts from the next flight up which is a SpaceX crew dragon that would typically carry four people so the crew n flight is going to be flying with two empty seats and the two people that arrive on crew 9 still have to complete their mission so even though Butch and sunny are getting a new ride it doesn't leave the station until February 2025 now it's probably worth saying just one more time these astronauts are hardened professionals this is what they signed up for they are not up there freaking out from claustrophobia or cabin fever or starving to death or whatever other dramatic nonsense gets thrown around I mean they are still human they're probably bummed about missing Christmas with their families but they are going to be just fine as for Starliner though that's a tough call the ship will return autonomously for a third time meaning that Boeing is no closer to fulfilling their contract requirements than they were 2 years ago they need to successfully complete a crude flight test before they can run their first legitimate crew mission that would be four astronauts on board and a scheduled stay at the ISS of around 6 months the biggest problem is that even at this time of writing as Starliner is being prepped for return Boeing still doesn't know why their thrusters don't work and the only physical evidence they have is about to burn up in the atmosphere and come down as a bunch of dust so what comes next for Starliner well assuming that the capsule makes it back down to earth in one piece Boeing will start getting ready to do it all over again the company still to this day believes that their spaceship is safe and while NASA May disagree in the short term the space agency is still committed to sending their astronauts to orbit on Starliner in the long term do we believe either of them well when there are billions of dollars on the line people tend to be very careful about the things they say in public the truth is that Boeing has already spent all of the contract money on Starliner the idea of making a profit is long gone this becomes about trying to minimize the loss which is already substantial it's hard to really gauge how much of an effect Starliner has had on the company as a whole their bottom line their stock price because in parallel to all of the setbacks and failures with the space operations Boeing has had an exponentially worse problem with their airplane division this is serious stuff and it's already killed a lot of people so we're not going there today but there are essentially two options on the table for Boeing neither is good they can just quit right now and scrub Starliner this would stop the bleeding but it also means that the company does not fulfill its contract requirements to NASA and therefore does not receive the $4 billion of government money or they can push forward with Starliner which would cost more money and it could still fail to ever fulfill its obligations but there is a narrow chance of success and then Boeing could start selling rides to the ISS on Starliner and make an effort to at the very least Break Even but the odds of them being able to accomplish this before the space station is deorbited and destroyed by space XX that's definitely not in Boeing's favor so what did we learn from all of this space is hard rocket science is hard being an astronaut is hard and money makes the world go around but maybe the biggest take away is that if we're actually going to get anywhere in the field of space exploration if we ever have any hope of getting back to the Golden Age of the 1960s when companies like Boeing and Rocket could take an insane idea and turn it into a fully functioning reliable Moon rocket in just 5 years I don't know how that works but I know that it involves putting Engineers back at the top of the priority list and knocking shareholders down a few pegs that might be a solid First St step